Silent scream: Jean Dujardin's performance in the silent 'The Artist' stands out in a year when many movie characters had little dialogue.

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Not that there hasn't been the usual cacophony of media chatter over the ups and downs of each nominee's chances before the winners are announced Feb. 26.

But vocal dexterity has taken a back seat to quiet eloquence among many of the contenders, including performances from Max von Sydow's mute Dresden-bombing survivor in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close to Rooney Mara's seething-on-the-inside rebel hacker in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It says a lot when the most expressive emoting in Steven Spielberg's War Horse is delivered not by the talking humans in the World War I tale but by the silent steeds as they strike noble poses upon the battlefield.

"To paraphrase an old saying, a look can be worth a thousand words," says film historian and critic Leonard Maltin. "An actor's expressive face or the timing of a scene that leads up to dialogue can have far greater impact than the dialogue itself. Just as sometimes the absence of music can be as powerful as music itself."

It's a major shift from last year when Colin Firth played a stuttering British ruler whose delivery of a landmark radio address was the crowning glory of The King's Speech, a four-time winner including best picture.

Joining in the silent treatment this year is Martin Scorsese's Hugo, which boasts the most nominations with 11. The 3-D family fable might be a visual marvel of 21st-century gee-wizardry, and there are plenty of lines spoken. But what appears to be the story of an orphaned boy hiding out in a train station in 1930s Paris evolves into an inspirational tribute to French film pioneer George Méliès, complete with enchanting re-creations of his whimsical wordless fantasies from the early 1900s.

Making the biggest noise about the sound of silence? The Artist, the nearly dialogue-free black-and-white homage to the early days of Hollywood that is right behind Hugo with 10 nominations. The anointed front-runner in the best-picture race after claiming most of the telltale honors leading up to the Academy Awards could become only the second silent film to grab the top prize since the inaugural year of the Oscars, when the 1927 fighter-pilot classic Wings took off with the win.

State-of-the-art backlash

Michel Hazanavicius, director of The Artist, suggests he and his fellow filmmakers might be reacting to the sometimes discordant crush of state-of-the-art technology and viewing options consuming the movie industry.

"We are entering a new era now with all these new ways to watch a movie, on computers or on a phone," he says. "Maybe that is causing directors to go back to the roots of film and look at what is really important before jumping into a new era."

It also might be a matter of nostalgia for pre-Google times, he says. "Now, if you want information, you can get it in five seconds. But you can also find the exact opposite information. You don't know who to believe. So maybe silence is the answer to too much communication."

Hazanavicius, who was able to pursue his dream of making a silent film after the success of his two French OSS 117 spy spoofs, could have chosen any backdrop. But he settled upon a meta-style approach — making a silent movie set during the period where such cinema was in vogue and focusing on the impact of the arrival of sound — as a way to convince today's audiences to feel comfortable with the retro format.

"I realized I needed a justification for why it's a silent movie. My own pleasure was not enough. I thought if I tell the story of a silent movie actor, they would accept a silent movie by itself. It was lovely to go beyond the gimmick. A door opened. I could put all my love for Hollywood and classic American movies into it."

Boosting The Artist's Oscar chances is its nominated star Jean Dujardin, who was all but unknown in the United States just months ago until portraying a silver-screen idol who refuses to adapt his style to talkies. No matter that he utters only two words on screen ("With pleasure!") and sometimes struggles with English in interviews — his charm needs no translation.

Whether kidding around with Jay Leno or lending class to a subpar spoof of The Artist with a guest spot in a Saturday Night Live skit, this animated-browed bon vivant has managed to sail past the ultimate vessel of American male magnetism himself, George Clooney, as the favorite for best actor.

The one nagging drawback for The Artist is the fact that most moviegoers have yet to seize the opportunity to experience a vintage genre done with up-to-date technology and on a big screen. Since opening in late November, it has grossed $25 million in a little more than 1,000 theaters. Meanwhile, Clooney's The Descendants, also up for best picture, opened just a week earlier and has collected $72 million in twice as many theaters.

So-called Oscarologists might be wringing their hands over The Artist's tepid take so far, especially since a film with bragging rights to 10 Oscar nominations usually gets some kind of box-office bump. But Harvey Weinstein, who bought the movie for his Weinstein Co. even before it was finished, says he isn't worried.

"Everyone says 'Wow, only $25 million,' " he says. "If it does well with the academy, it will likely make $40 million or $50 million. For a black-and-white silent film, that is like $500 million. I laugh about the grosses. No matter what happens, it is a risk everyone took, and we have already made millions of dollars."

A specialist at awards strategizing since his days as co-chairman of Miramax, Weinstein is employing a similar slow-and-steady pattern of adding theaters that worked with 2002's Chicago. The first musical to win best picture since 1968's Oliver! would eventually gross $170 million after a limited opening and a shaky start.

Right now, The Artist is drawing mainly a 35-and-up crowd. But if Oscar predictions come true, Weinstein hopes to capitalize on the on-air exposure and broaden that demographic by adding more than twice the current count of theaters.

'Napoleon' on the march

Meanwhile, silent-film fans are over the moon that Hollywood is catering to their obsession. "I'm delighted by the success of The Artist," says Bruce Goldstein, director of repertory programming at New York's Film Forum who regularly draws crowds with classics featuring silent greats Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. "It's getting people hip to silent films. Even if just 1% of the audience seeing The Artist check out real silents of the period, it's fantastic."

He does have an ulterior motive behind his enthusiasm. In late March, Goldstein is assisting with a four-day special presentation of Abel Gance's Napoleon, a 5½-hour restored version of the 1927 biopic extravaganza with a full orchestra and three-screen projection put on by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at Oakland's Paramount Theatre. Though a four-hour re-edited Napoleon was taken on the road with Francis Ford Coppola as its sponsor in the early '80s, this is the most complete edition yet.

For Kevin Brownlow, the world's foremost silent-film expert and the only movie historian to be granted an Oscar, the four public performances of Napoleon represent the culmination of a half-century-plus restoration project.

He, too, is enamored of The Artist's achievements. "It was expressive enough so that I could sit back and enjoy it in exactly the same way as a Colleen Moore picture or a similar film of the silent era. It has the spirit of the originals. I am very envious of the director. I would have loved to have made that."

Napoleon, however, is a silent film on creative steroids.

"When it was shown in America years ago, it was observed that there were things being done in that picture that we haven't thought of yet," he says wryly. "It has more technical innovations than any film ever made, including Citizen Kane."

Alexander Payne, the nominated director of The Descendants whose knowledge of cinema runs deep and esoteric, will be among the thousands checking out Napoleon. Twice, on back-to-back days.

Though friendly with Hazanavicius after hanging out together at pre-Oscar functions, he also finds himself a bit envious of the French director.

"I do think constantly about making a silent film," Payne says. "I wanted to slug him for beating me to it.

"There was this one big film with a major star. I went in on a meeting on a early draft. I said I thought it should be a silent film and I was laughed out of the office."

With some satisfaction, he adds, "It ended up being dreadful."

Maltin doesn't foresee a renaissance in silent filmmaking anytime soon even if The Artist starts burning up the box office. But, after noting the brisk Amazon sales for the restored Blu-ray of Wings that was recently released, he concedes, "It won't make me unhappy if a revival happens."

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